First Part of “Perpetuality”!
Wonder. He perpetually wondered what it would feel like for life to slowly wither away: not in the dramatic fashion of a sudden end, but in the gradual, inexorable manner like an autumn’s final leaf detaching from the branch, drifting to the earth, and serving as ridicule for bypassers feet. To realize, in some quiet hour of reflection, that no merciful touch would ever again calm his breath or linger upon his chest with tenderness. That his soul, so long confined to the frame he wore, might be drawn out slowly, drop by drop, through the pale, translucent wells of his eyes. That he would be left not dead, but existing only enough to grasp handfuls of his long, unkempt hair and beg for some unseen force to release him. For a savior to save him from the unsaveable, he thought as he imaged the imagined savior and the unimaginable.
These were not thoughts borne of idle melancholy; they were ponderings. He wondered not just for the sake of morbid curiosity, but because he feared he was already partway there to the unimaginable. Partway there to cry for a savior. And in those moments of desolation, his mind, ever circular in its workings, returned again and again to the hands. The hands that once steadied his faltering heart; the hands that pressed softly against his chest when he feared the rising of anguish would consume him whole; the hands that mended him, or so he had thought, when he could no longer find the strength to stand upright.
Ironic, he thought—always that word, that word that stung like a rebuke—that he had taken those hands for granted. He had believed in their permanence, trusted in their return. He had mistaken them for truth. He had mistaken the hands for saviors. But the longer he reflected, and the deeper he dared to peer into his past, the more the fog cleared, and he beheld what he had been too blind to see before. It was not the hands he had taken for granted. It was himself.
He had sought the same snake to bite him, again and again, with a loyalty bordering on madness. He had pressed the wound to his chest and called it affection. He had convinced himself that pain sanctified him. And all the while, he waited. Waited for the hands to return. Hands to comfort. Hands to absolve. Hands to save. He mistook every pair of hands that reached toward him as the same. He confused proximity for protection, touch for tenderness, and the arms that reached him for advantage. He thought that the act of healing implied the will to preserve.
Until one day, as the sun baked the sand beneath his weary feet, he encountered the Camel Rider. The man did not speak at first. He stood, upright and still, the reins of his beast curled loosely in one gloved hand. His robes were unadorned, his countenance unreadable. He regarded the hollow-eyed man before him with neither sympathy nor disdain. “Do not dwell in these illusions,” he said at last. His voice was as dry and resolute as the very terrain on which they stood. “Not all hands are saviors.”
The words landed like a stone in still water; but the words were not fell into water, nor were they simply a stone: they were a cyclone is a man’s mind. He said nothing in response. He could not. The cyclone had started to rotate at an incredible pace, and created a whirring sound so loud, he could not hear the Camel Rider any longer nor could he produce and comprehend words of his own. The truth that the Camel Rider had lunged at his mind and his lungs stung worse than any snake’s bite.
And slowly, slowly, it began to dawn on him.
Perhaps it was not the bleeding that was the betrayal. Nor the venom, nor even the fangs. Perhaps it was the hand that introduced the serpent to his sanctuary. The hand that cradled him as if to protect, only to place the creature at his breast with a gentle, deceptive calm. The hand that nursed him back to health, not for his own sake, but to ensure that he would be strong enough to bleed again. The hand of deceit, he figured, but figuring wasn’t enough; the cyclone emptied out him, and the cyclone, dare he say, was not even created by the Camel Rider, but by the hands themselves.
He had mistaken cruelty for care. He had seen manipulation in the guise of mercy. He had called those hands holy when they were, in fact, nothing more than instruments of control. Deceit in its finest form. The epiphany was not liberating, rather it increased the intensity of the cyclone even further and ruptured his lungs and breathing to a greater extent.
“You ruined me.” he spoke to himself with red-rimmed eyes. The accusation carried immense weight. It was directed to every hand he had once trusted. Every smile that masked coercion. Every false moment of safety that had turned to a blade at his back. “You recycled me until I crumbled,” he said, his throat closing on the final syllables. “Didn’t you?”
He thought he had been saved. He thought he had been loved. But love does not demand you break yourself into pieces to be held. Love does not weep with joy at the sight of your despair. Love does not plant serpents in the garden of your heart and then grieve when they bite. There was a kind of dignity in pain, he once believed. But now he saw it for what it was—a trap, gilded and alluring. He had been taught that suffering was a virtue, that endurance was strength, and that to be healed was to owe.
He owed nothing. Not to the hands that mended him. Not to the mouths that fed him poison disguised as truth. Not to the Camel Rider who spoke only in riddles and walked away before the sun could set. But there remained a question, unresolved. Had he been complicit in his own undoing?
Was it not his own hand that returned to the fire, again and again, knowing it would burn? Was it not he who gave the serpent its name, called it comfort, let it coil around him like a lover? The more he thought, the less he knew. And that was the deepest wound of all: the awareness that certainty was an illusion, and that clarity, once gained, could be a poison in itself.
He sat beneath a sky that neither judged nor forgave. His fingers twitched idly as he said, “I let them break me. I let myself be made and unmade, remade and undone. I was recycled not by them, but by the part of me that feared being discarded altogether.” The wind answered with silence. There were no more hands. No more serpents. No more saviors. Only the long, barren stretch of road ahead.
And perhaps, for the first time, that was enough.
He began to wonder—had he been mistaken about healing entirely? Was it ever about restoration? Or was healing merely the body’s subtle form of forgetting? Once laughter fluttered in his chest like a trapped bird and threatened to escape. But were those days healing, or were they interludes between wounds? He could not tell.
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